Saturday, December 11, 2010

You know, one of the great things about having ADHD is I now have an excuse for getting side tracked and going on a code jungle adventure to solve bugs of epic proportions.

And that's just what happened this weekend!

I've been using jQuery a lot more right along with ASP.NET MVC 2. As most, I keep working on old projects and simply bring them up to speed, try different things out, the like.

For those new to jQuery, it is a high performance, micro footprint, JavaScript library that that makes it possible to make client side development as extreme as something like Facebook for developers even like me... Not only that, there are literally thousands of extensions for this thing. The one I was playing with is known as jQuery UI Tabs

I chose to use an XML/XSL content engine I had written to do some email templating. I wanted to convert this to a dynamic form that would be driven by XML. Basically, I wanted to create the input form + output(s) from common schema and neither knows of the other or has dependency. Which is pretty much what XML is there for... ;)

One such feature was to be able to break the input into a friendly / easy to use Form. Using an XSL transform, It rendered an HTML form of 1..x # of tabs. Without the details of how the whole tab system works, for each tab, you have a

with a unique identifier such as tabs-#. Where # is a sequential value from 1..x. Using the syntax

but then... something weird happens.. The tabs show up a second time, but this time, no formatting, everything looks horrible on the screen, and the Page_Load is called again by a GET. Combine this with the dynamic nature of the control, and it becomes incredibly hard to debug.

I disabled all my jQuery/JavaScript I had written. Still getting a double load. Not only that, injecting it. I disabled the tabs portion itself, still coming up twice. I'm getting a JavaScript runtime error much like when ASP.NET Ajax has two versions (1.0.xxx & 3.5) in the same application. Checked that... Fine.

Maybe jQuery has a bug in this version (I had downloaded 1.4.2 a few months back), so I upgraded to 1.4.4. I switched to the Google CDN. Over and over it kept coming back like a g*d damn zombie!

I go back to my XSL, did I have a script reference in there? Nothing stands out.

Finally, trusty ol 'View HTML' and your favorite text editor. Combing line by line, I'm trying to figure it out. It's not standing out. Until I finally come to the

<divid="tr_tabs-2">

or that's what I thought it should have looked like........

Not quite though sport! Looked a little more like

<divid="&#xA; tr_tabs-2">

Well, that certainly won't be found by tabs, and looks like we might have a little bug if so. I don't know, I wasn't going to full investigate it. I wanted to fix this and be done. Why would this happen? Back to XSL

Ends up, Visual Studio and some editors like to put extra spaces and XSL doesn't like concating + string trimming without using XSL functions.

However, knowing how I like to hit Format Document, and this seemed like an easy mistake to make, I couldn't imagine this was the best way. Nope! of course not. Using the XSL function (concat) solved this easily and still can use my format document feature in VS!

Monday, August 2, 2010

Finally been able to work on YakShaver a bit more trying to finally finish up what I'm calling the SFD feature. As I've been working on it off and on for the past few years there sometimes can be days (read weeks/months) between getting dedicated time.

Recently I made a change to go from the TFS 2010 libraries back to the 2008. Not because something was wrong with them, just that one of the installation locations I had would not allow me to install TFS 2010 (anything related). So, I rolled back my project to the 2008 and apparently just left it as is (never compiled or compiled and didn't pay attention to errors).

Fast forward to last Friday. I've finally got time, open up the solution, notice I have some errors. "Not a big deal" I think to myself, how much could be wrong? I knew it already worked before. But I could not get this to compile. The errors were all pretty close to the same.

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IProjectFile' is obsolete: 'This interface has been deprecated. Please remove all references.

Not just this interface, IBuildStore was another. But this was only a warning, so I ensured I had TreatWarningsAsErrors turned off, still couldn't get it to compile. WTF, was all I could think.

As I started diagnosing, I looked at another library I had referenced (not a project file reference, but just a DLL I had written previously.) This DLL referenced the 2010 libraries and upon compilation would cause the error.

I didn't see how this could actually cause an issue, but wanted to verify. I found the project file for the DLL in question, included it in my solution, and sure enough same error. I modified the project to utilize the 2008 libraries (9.0.0.0) instead. Compiled. Poof.

It was logged as a bug with TFS in connect. But doesn't look like it is. Here is the original link to see more details.

Friday, June 18, 2010

After 2.5 years, my current development laptop is just not keeping up as I would like. The new rave seems to be in the i7 series processor from intel and the T7500 Core 2 Duo just does not handle VMWare + Visual Studio 2010 and a few other apps quite as well. Plus, Quad Core vs. Duo. Easy call.

Like before, I wanted to make sure I got a laptop that lasted. I consider 2.5 years (1.5 years after paying it off) to be a acceptable amount of time, especially for a laptop. I upgraded it over time of course, but it does have it's limits.

As a result, I ordered a new Dell Studio XPS 16. The basic configuration from Dell is

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Typically in my blog I try to avoid swearing. Sure, I swear like sailor in person, but for some reason, the written word in front of god (heavy internet user) and everyone; I try to be more careful and show a little more respect.

But this article deserved the cross reference and I doubt I could have said it any better. Do it Fucking now! This doesn't have to mean you are being yelled at by a boss or anything negative. It is a positive statement. No need to wait, if you know what to do, do it.

Monday, May 3, 2010

At work we've been transitioning over to Team Build 2008 from Cruise Control.NET 1.5. It's not that we have anything against CC.NET, in fact it's quite an amazing and versitle program. We are simply going in the direction to have everything in the same software stack.

I do feel we will still use some CC.NET features from time to time and simply invoke the TFSBuild.exe instead. As a result, we will still get all our data pumped into the TFSBuild Store and no one will be the wiser.

There are two ways to run the TFSBuildService. The one is interactive (command line mode) and the other is as a service. To run this as a service, you have to use the sc.exe command.

I struggled for a couple hours until I found this post. Deep in there, you will see him mark out that after each = sign. There must be a space. Otherwise it will keep running the syntax options and you go insane trying to figure out what you are doing wrong.